(Credit: Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET)

We may now have a better idea of why Apple objects to Google Latitude.

It appears that Apple has purchased PlaceBase, a company that produced a maps API called Pushpin and offered a mapping service much like Google Maps. The evidence, dug up by

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Fatigued of tablet rumors yet? Some of us are. Then something comes along that really jazzes us up.

At
first these whispers started out rather vague, with conflicting sizes
and hardware specs, but as the year closes out specifics are starting
to coalesce. Is it a secret too big to keep or is it the bandwagon of
rumor-mongering? Only time will tell. While we wait, let’s follow along.

Image Source: Gizmodo

To
start with, according to a source with a track record for reliability,
iLounge is reporting that the 7" screen is out and the 10.7" version is
in. This confirms what others have been reporting for the last month or
so and corresponds to Apple’s past history of making multiple
iterations of a product during development, deselecting versions with
time and testing.

The idea that the tablet might be a large
scale iPod touch is also bolstered by this source who claims that the
machines will run a modified iPhone OS, will appear in 3G and non-3G
models, and will resemble the iPhone in design details even down to the
curved back.

Where the rumors from iLounge get interesting is
when the source claims the tablet is NOT designed to compete with
netbooks, but is instead a "a
slate-like replacement for books and magazines." Add this to sources at
Gizmodo and an idea is beginning to coalesce as to what this machine is
envisioned to be.

According to Brian Lam, two people "related
to the NY Times" have spoken to him about contacts between Apple and
the news org for delivery of their print and media content through
iTunes. Stir in his contact, a "VP in textbook publishing" who claims
that McGraw-Hill and Oberlin Press are working with Apple to move
textbooks over to iTunes. Toss in a story about several magazine
publishers visiting Cupertino to discuss the future of magazines,
replete with some interactive mockups of titles. Add Andy Ihnatko’s
report of rumors that "trucks loaded with books would arrive at a
loading dock on the Apple
campus, and offload big, big, big, big, huge load of books, and then
the trucks would leave empty."

Now we’re getting somewhere.
Not only have the rumors begun to solidify into definitive hardware
ideas, but also a marketing plan appears to be shaping up that make the
tablet not only viable but a game changer. Apple wants to have titles
ready to roll out the moment the tablet hits the street, but there has
to be something new to bring to the table rather than just larger
screen viewing of media content. Too large to serve as just a phone and
mp3 player, the tablet essentially melds the best aspects of the
Kindle, its size and book catalog, with the best aspects of the iPhone,
basically everything.

One can easily see Apple shaking up the
entire print industry, much in the way its upended the music industry.
Textbooks with additional multimedia content, newspapers and magazine
subscriptions through iTunes, and, best of all, full-color comics not
delivered panel by panel or scrunched down into a format requiring a
day’s worth of pinch resizing.

Last thing: rumors seem to be settling down on 2010 as the release date
with an announcement in the second half of January. Most sources
suggest January 19th as an announcement date with a summer release. We can hardly wait.

The Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile, and Palm OS also fell.
Blackberry went from 10% to 8%. Windows mobile fell from 7% to 4%, and the
now-discontinued Palm OS went from 3% to a measly 1%. The only Mobile OSs
that gained share besides the iPhone OS were fairly new systems like Android and
Palm’s webOS, which went to 7 and 4 percent respectively.

As always, Apple still has its largest advantage in North
America and Western Europe. Surprisingly, the iPhone also dominates the mobile traffic in the South Pacific with an amazing 79%.